Konstantinos Makris, Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and Associate Faculty Member of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), was awarded a “Consolidator Grant” by the European Research Council (ERC). The “Beyond_Anderson” project, whose funding amounts to € 1.5 million, will have a duration of five years and will be executed at IESL-FORTH, in collaboration with the Department of Physics of the University of Crete. In the specific call of the ERC Consolidator Grants for 2021, 2652 proposals were submitted and only 313 got funded. It is noted that under the call “ERC-Consolidator Grants-2021” this is the only successful application in Greece.

The program of Consolidator Grants concerns very competitive grants within the European Union and aims to attract excellent researchers that are at the forefront of research. It aims at supporting scientists to consolidate their independence by establishing a research team and continuing to develop a successful career in Europe. This is the seventh time that an IESL researcher receives a prestigious ERC grant, whereas FORTH has attracted the most ERC grants in Greece (with budget more than 39 million €).

The “Beyond_Anderson” (Non-Hermitian Transport in non-Hermitian Anderson forbidden land) theoretical project will be centered around the recently discovered ground-breaking way of transport of waves in random media. Anderson localization is a fundamental phenomenon of wave physics that is related to the localization of waves in systems with randomness. As a result, localization prevents light to go through such materials. The proposal suggests a new way of accessing the forbidden land of Anderson localization, by pumping and dissipating photon energy, something that is impossible with electrons. In order to overcome such limitation, the main idea is to use new materials in order to provide an exit for the light that is trapped inside such a classical or quantum labyrinth.

The ERC Referees of Prof. Makris' proposal write that this project is “a very important and challenging theoretical project”, that “it addresses the previous problems in a new and original way and it involves truly innovative approaches”. Such an evaluation by the external referees, confirms the internationally acclaimed and innovative character of the research that takes place at the IESL-FORTH and the University of Crete.

For more infomation, please read the press release of the European Research Council:

https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2021-consolidator-grants-results

Brief CV

Konstantinos Makris is Assistant Professor at the department of Physics of the University of Crete from 2017, and an Associate Faculty Member of the IESL from 2019. He obtained his Diploma from the Electrical and Computer Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 2002 and his PhD in Theoretical Physics and Photonics from the School of Optics and Photonics (CREOL-FCPE) at the University of Central Florida, Orlando (USA) in 2008. From 2008 until 2010 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. During 2011 he was Lecturer at Institute for Theoretical Physics of Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), Austria. From 2012 until 2015 he was a Marie Curie International Outgoing fellow (MC-IOF) between Princeton University, USA and TU-Wien, Austria, and between 2015 and 2017 a senior researcher at the Center for Quantum Complexity and Nanotechnology of the Univeristy of Crete.

His research interests lie on the interface of condensed matter physics and photonics, with emphasis on nonlinear optics and solitons, non-Hermitian photonics, topological lattices, and disordered physics of complex structures.

More information regarding the research of Prof. Makris is available at his personal webpage:

https://sites.google.com/site/konstantinosgmakris/

Contact Information:

Konstantinos Makris

Associate Faculty Member of the IESL

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, University of Crete

Τel. 2810-394227

e-mail: makris@physics.uoc.gr